My Rating: Let’s all take a moment to appreciate the amazing run director Denis Villeneuve is on. He showed the world that Jake Gyllenhaal can go dark with Prisoners and Enemy, Sicario was one of the best films of 2015 and next year, Villeneuve has the long-awaited Blade Runner sequel hitting theaters. For now, we’ll have to make do with what’s the […]

Liam Neeson has a particular set of skills. Since 2008’s Taken, that set has been mostly limited to kicking ass and taking names. There’s nothing wrong with that, though he’s done it enough to create his own sub-genre, the “Liam Neeson action movie.” Like any other actor whose created their own action genre, you know what […]

Well, the holiday season has come and gone; we’re still dealing with that pesky Selma controversy, though. Voting for the 2014 Oscar nominations began on Dec. 29 and will close Thursday, Jan. 8. In other words, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts’s (BAFTA) nominations, Golden Globe winners, and the Directors Guild of America’s […]

Awards, Fests, and Campaigns Disney will push Saving Mr. Banks, which had a great stateside debut at the AFI Fest, as a drama at the Golden Globes. Most of us thought the film, which examines Walt Disney and P.L. Travers’ disagreements about 1964’s Mary Poppins, would contend in the musical or comedy categories. The film’s […]

We Oscar obsessives discuss the Academy Awards throughout the year, but the Toronto International Film Festival kicks off what we refer to as the Oscar season – and with good reason, as we have lots of ground to cover this week. Bill Condon’s The Fifth Estate kicked off the fest with mostly weak notices. Faring even […]

The Oscar race won’t really begin for another few weeks, but given some recent developments – an infamous name change being among them – I figured I’d go ahead and resume Oscar Watching. Even before the Toronto International Film Festival kicks into gear, I’ve had to revise quite a few of my predictions. I’m barely […]

I had the chance to see Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or-winning Amour (Love) over the weekend. It also played the AFI Fest – and we’ll be talking about that in a bit – but I saw it here on the East Coast. The French-language aspect might hinder its chances at Oscar glory, but the critics – […]

So, Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski, and Lana Wachowski’s bold ensemble piece Cloud Atlas hit theaters this weekend, and audiences are showing little interest. For whatever my $0.02 is worth, the film is spectacular. It’s a film that stumbles quite often in its individual threads – there are six different stories to follow and one of […]

Twenty years ago, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln might have been the undeniable, no-holds-barred front-runner to win best picture, best director, and myriad other prizes at the Academy Awards. While such a sweep might not happen in this day and age, the aura of a prestige film with an iconic director at the helm, incredible actors carrying […]

YOUNG ADULT isn’t just the best drama/comedy of the year, it’s also a horror story that plays out in terrifying slow motion. By the end of the movie, Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron in an inspired role, her best acting since MONSTER) hasn’t changed. In fact she’s become worse, a more insular version of the stifled personality that’s killing her at the beginning of the film, and it seems as though redemption has been lost. Yet the journey to this awful destination is two hours of quality entertainment, and the best that the JUNO creative team of writer Diablo Cody (UNITED STATES OF TARA) and director Jason Reitman (UP IN THE AIR, THANK YOU FOR SMOKING) have yet offered, and a startling reminder that there are still films that don’t require thousands of pounds of dynamite to have the most powerful explosions.